


what is a place like me (doing in a girl like this)

by dilangley



Category: The Mummy (1999), Wonder Woman (2017), Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: Adventurous Shenanigans, Because I love denial and Wondertrev and excuses for fluff, F/M, Gen, Post-Canon Wonder Woman, Steve didn't die, The Crossover You Did Not Ask For
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-06 02:11:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21218849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilangley/pseuds/dilangley
Summary: What would happen if Diana and Steve just so happened to be in Cairo when Evy Carnahan read fromThe Book of the Dead?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is so self-indulgent. My favorite superhero and my favorite guilty pleasure movie brought together for my own joy. 
> 
> This story is completely written. I am just revising and editing each chapter along the way!

_ Cairo, Egypt _

_ 1926 _

“Remind me, dears, why you’ve traveled all the way to a savage land for information that could have been sent in a nice packet. The whole idea is preposterous. Come home soon. Yours sincerely, Etta.” 

Steve Trevor imitated his secretary’s speedy cadence perfectly before switching to his own good-natured rumble. “How are you surviving this ‘savage land,’ Miss Prince?”

Diana smiled and lifted her teacup. She pursed her lips and blew the rising steam before taking a sip. Steve knew without her answering that she loved Egypt. Traits that were shocking in jolly old England suited her to these desert sands, and he had to admit that seeing her in sheer, cool fabrics that slithered through fingertips, made his blood pound faster. Today she wore a white silk blouse, the top three buttons loose, and a flowing white skirt. On some women, the monochromatic effect would have faded them. For her, it only emphasized her beautiful olive skin and the exotic tilt of her eyes.

Her eyes, framed by lashes and beautiful crinkles, still made him dizzy when turned his way. 

He was glad she would never have to know how often her beauty struck him silly.

“Anyway.” He grabbed another bite of his fuul and tried not to wish for eggs and bacon instead. When in Rome and such. “No matter how much we are enjoying this trip, we have to get back to England.”

“And when we do, will we be traveling to America?” 

Steve coughed down the last bite of breakfast and shook his head. “Nothing for me in America. We’ve had that talk.”

“Yes. We have.” She met his gaze, unrelenting in her scrutiny. “It’s been over a decade since you’ve been home.”

He thought about spinning a line her way, concocting a joke from a few funny tidbits, but didn’t. “You’re coming up on a decade yourself. Should we set sail for Paradise Island when we finish up here?”

She frowned. “I can never return to Themyscira. Once I chose to become part of Man’s World, I could never go home.”

“Yeah. Well, you’re not the only one who can’t go home again,” he muttered.

As he stood up, he could still feel her watching him as he washed off his pocket knife and tossed it in his rucksack. The Great War may have ended years ago, but he still carried what he needed on his back. He supposed those habits forged in Ares’ fires were hard to shake. Their line of work now meant diplomacy more than danger, but he always kept a pistol in his boot even with a bulletproof woman by his side. 

Diana switched her gaze from him to her book’s aged papyrus and hieroglyphics. Though her spoken Egyptian -- both modern and ancient -- was flawless, the ancient symbols still eluded her.

They were in Egypt on a diplomacy mission to share the story and files of the secret campaign against Isabel Maru during the War. Ostensibly, this was an above-board assignment, but they had not chosen Steve Trevor and Diana Prince for nothing. They were not merely here as a public service announcement against chemical warfare but also to gather intelligence on Egypt’s productions and advancements in the field. Their similar work in South Africa and Russia (an Entente power, no less) had turned up troubling developments. British rule notwithstanding, Egypt could be a wildcard. A place this ancient could not be ruled from afar.

Today Steve would be meeting directly with some of the top chemists in this capital city. He finished off his tie and examined himself in the mirror, pleased with the balance of professionalism and informality. 

“I’m sorry you can’t come with me today,” he said, turning back around. The Egyptian rules of gender were firm, immovable, and Diana had developed subtlety in her subversions over the last eight years. These days, she was not one to burst her way in, bubbling with ideas and certainty. Instead, she proved herself, again and again, so thoroughly that even the stodgiest of Brits had looked at Steve and said, “You’ll have to take her with you on every mission, old boy,” even as they thought their own wives could do nothing more than warm their slippers for them.

“I could come with you if I wished.” She paused meaningfully. “But I have work to do myself.”

She laid down her book and crossed her way to him. Instinctively, his hands went out to her, catching her waist and pulling her in close.

“You’ll be careful?” He asked the question without irony.

“Yes.” 

“So will I.” 

She smiled, her face softening all over, melting into something sensual and inviting, and Steve’s skin warmed. He smoothed a wayward strand of dark hair from her face, his thumb tracing the graceful curve of her cheekbone. For the millionth time, the urge to ask her to marry him swelled up from his toes, bubbled in his insides, and for the millionth time, his brain which snatched it and filed it away. A mortal man -- of neither family nor money nor fame -- had no business asking marriage of a goddess. Even when his heart swelled so full of love that it threatened to burst.

He could work at her side as an equal, worship her body in bed, and follow her boldly into any battle, and that simply had to be enough.

Diana pressed her lips together. “The last breakfast biscuit for your thoughts?”

“I’ll split it with you for a kiss,” he bartered.

He got the privilege of kissing her smile into an open-mouthed O of pleasure.

* * *

Steve finished his brief presentation with his most stunning showpiece: the letter, penned by Dr. Poison herself, lamenting her invention. He had his doubts about its honesty. After all, Isabel Maru had gleefully killed hundreds and worked to kill tens of thousands. But it was Diana who believed in her, who claimed to have seen hope in the other woman’s eyes when receiving mercy. Diana wrote to Dr. Maru in prison and received lengthy, thoughtful replies on subjects from daily life to religion to forgiveness. Half of the time, their letters were not even in one language but a blurry mix of linguistic play.

“The greatest threat of these weapons is their…” The speaker, a tall, thin gentleman with round gold spectacles, waved his hand in front of him. “How do you say it in your tongue? Their, their… their random nature.” 

He looked relieved as he found the English.

“Perhaps that is the next development then. Concentration of these weapons.”

“Or the dismantlement. There is already talk on the world stage of agreeing to take them off the table as a part of modern combat,” Steve said.

Four sets of eyes turned to him but only one set was accompanied by a nodding head.

“It would be best if we could return to more personal warfare. Indiscriminate killing via bomb or chemicals makes it too easy to pretend war is not what it is,” the nodding scientist said.

“But one can never guarantee that other countries will obey such agreements.”

“Secret treaties in the Great War have already proven the problem of wide scale trust.”

“There will always be another Isabel Maru. She might as well be in your country as anywhere else, even if she is never used.”

The debate escalated into their native tongue, and Steve listened to the swirl of leashed anger around him. In Russia, this same debate had scared him. Now he recognized that it was a natural part of the process. Insight into what had nearly happened, into the capabilities of the Central Powers’ chemical progress, sparked fearful anger. The first instinct was to arm oneself against another threat of this kind. It did not mean that they would not find their way to de-escalation. 

He strolled to the window of the conference room and looked out over the Cairo marketplace. Merchants shouted their wares and tugged at passerby, who ignored the spectacle with all the ease of natives. The scene offered enough noise and color to almost convince him he was not reliving a dark night in Belgium eight years ago. Again. Every time he shared the information, he was back there, terrified of untold casualties, watching Ares wipe the tarmac with Diana, watching everything become too big for him to stop.

He had gotten on a plane prepared to die, the warmth of her skin still tingling on his hands, and yet at the last moment, he had gotten some crazy idea that he was a superhero too, that he could do the impossible.

And it had worked. Somehow he had pulled on a chute pack, opened the side door of the plane, unloaded his gun into the back compartment, and leapt out into the night sky.

Even the nine months in a Belgian hospital afterward had seemed like the best damn outcome imaginable. 

He rubbed his right arm, able to feel the pebbled, irregular scar tissue even through the fabric, and his left hip tingled its queer ache, a psychosomatic reminder of the broken bones along that side of his body.

Even though he hadn’t died to keep these weapons from killing, he had come darn close, and it wasn’t pleasant to hear these men debate casually whether or not to push forward in developing even more of them.

“Mr. Trevor.” The gold-spectacled man caught his attention. “Thank you for your time and your information.”

“Of course.” Steve nodded respectfully. “I’m always willing to discuss the horrors of chemical warfare with some of the most learned minds in the world.”

Handshakes and smiles all around, he walked back out into the market and to the hotel. The bottom floor of the stately facility was a bar, and he could use a stiff drink.

“Whiskey please,” he said. 

“An American, thank God. We’re surrounded by savages and limeys.” 

Steve looked over at the bartender, a dark-skinned Egyptian now sporting a terrible frown, and winced. Then he looked over at the speaker. He was American too, half-drunk, slumped against the wooden bar. Steve observed him through the eyes of a seasoned spy: dust, thick on his boots and thinly layered all the way up his clothing; eyes glassy and unfocused but still darting, high on adrenaline; and the heavy scent of body odor. His comment would have made him an asshole if his entire body hadn’t emanated fear.

“What brings you to Egypt with an attitude like that?”

“Treasure.” He laughed bitterly. “And we found it, oh boy, yes we did, we found it.”

“Treasure, huh? Congratulations.” Steve lifted his whiskey glass in a salute. He didn’t bother to ask why a successful treasure hunter’s knees would be knocking.

“Thanks.” The treasure hunter clinked their glasses together. “Name’s Isaac Henderson.”

“Steve Trevor.”

“Nice to meet you, Steve. Me and my buddies have tickets on the next boat out of this dump.” His voice dipped low, quivered. “You should get out of Egypt while you can.”

A shiver slid up Steve’s spine. “Why’s that?”

Henderson laughed bitterly. “Place is cursed, pal. Place is goddamned cursed.”

Steve opened his mouth to argue when the fountain through the open doorway caught his eye. Along the beautiful tilework, the water was supposed to fall in flows and trickles, a pleasing mix of sound and sight. Now it ran bright red.

“What the--” He started to say, but the sound of sputters and coughs around him swallowed the rest of his statement. He caught sight of his glass in his hand, its contents suddenly the thick, dark swirl of blood. 

“And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of water, and they became blood,” Henderson whispered the cryptic words, mouth open, eyes shut tight.

“Whiskey isn’t water,” Steve muttered, tilting his glass, feeling a stirring of horror himself.

“That is not the correct part of the Bible. The plagues of Egypt are discussed in Exodus. You are quoting Revelations.” Diana appeared beside them, and the severity of her features portended danger beyond bloody water. She met his eyes. “Steve, something terrible has been unleashed upon the world, and we must stop it.”


	2. Chapter 2

“So evil is going to destroy the world and we’re the spunky, ragtag team that’s going to stop it?” The man said with a bit of cheek.

Evelyn Carnahan looked around the hotel manager’s office at a motley cast of characters. In the cramped, cluttered space, each person loomed larger than he or she would have otherwise, six bodies in a space designed for no more than two. 

The speaker, an American who was perhaps even more handsome than her Mr. O’Connell, did not look at the strangers as he spoke but at the woman beside him. His eyes asked her to explain the mysteries of the world even as his tone maintained a flip edge. Evy pressed her mind to remember their names: Steve and Diana.

“Allah willing.” The leader of the Medjai spoke from his place in the corner. Every head turned his way. The dim light from the office’s flickering candles reflected on his facial tattoos.

“We’ve been here before then,” Steve said. Evy glanced over to see a shared secret smile between him and Diana.

“Yeah, yeah. Glad someone is feeling confident.” Jonathan spoke up now. “We’ve shot the old bastard, and he didn’t even flinch.”

“We?” Rick raised an eyebrow.

“Well, you,” Jonathan admitted before turning to the group. “It was Rick who shot him. I stood by for moral support, which is probably the role I’m most comfortable filling. I’ll leave the heroics to you strapping lads.”

“Okay.” Rick straightened up, done listening and ready for action. “So we know he’s coming for the rest of the Americans who took his jars, and those bastards all came back to the same hotel where we’re staying, so it shouldn’t be hard to find us a mummy.” 

Evy watched him touch each pistol at his side, ghost his hand over a knife at his waistband. In their brief time together, he had surprised her by being intelligent, focused, and courageously reckless. Her lips tingled with an almost-memory of their drunken night, a shadowy flashback to a kiss that didn’t happen. Rick kept talking.

“First, we lock the women upstairs and then we load up with everything we’ve got and follow Ardeth here wherever he says we need to go.”

The tingly affection switched to vibrating anger in an instant.

“If you think I’m going to stay here…” Evy began.

“I’ll stay and reconnoiter with the women, keep them safe.” Jonathan jumped into the conversation hopefully.

“We’re not going to want to go anywhere without Diana,” Steve amended.

“See? Now here’s a man who appreciates that this is no time for blatant misogyny. I can read hieroglyphics, Mr. O’Connell. Compare that to shooting a big gun and see which is more valuable for this adventure.” Evy stuck her chin out, and Rick met her eyes. 

“He can let his girl fight her own battles, but I’m not.” Without another word, he unceremoniously scooped her up and toted her out of the room. She couldn’t hear her own protests coming out of her mouth, a mix of insults, arguments, and kicking, over the roaring agitation in her ears.

“You are a moron if you leave me behind, O’Connell. You need me. This is an outrage. I read from the book, and it is my job to put him back to the afterlife.” Her shrieks escalated as the bumps of the stairs shook her. “Don’t you do this, you cretin. Put me down this instant. This instant!”

Of course, this moment of her words matched the exact moment he flung her onto the bed and stormed out. She heard him giving instructions to the Americans to neither to let her out nor anything else in, and she hollered one more indignant “O’CONNELL” before flopping into the chair.

It was only after she sat there, the steaming anger cooling off into acceptance and perhaps even shameful relief, that she reheard his words in her head. Rick O’Connell had referred to her as “his girl.” The possessive was barbaric, of course, presumptuous and ridiculous, but it spread warmth low and hot through her insides.

Yes, she supposed she would trust Rick O’Connell and his pistols against the Apocalypse, logic be damned.

* * *

The knock on the door startled her for only an instant before she reminded herself that no reborn mummy would knock politely. Evy grabbed her robe off of the table and slipped it over her nightdress before walking to the door. Unfortunately, it had no peephole, so she lived dangerously and opened it.

“Hello,” Evy said, the greeting rising at the end like a question. Diana Prince stood at her door. Earlier, she had been wearing coolly British attire, but now the other woman had on a black ensemble that looked like that of the Medjai, pants and all. Evy glanced down at her own rumpled pyjamas.

“Hello. Though the boys are inclined to shoot first and ask questions later, I was speaking with several of the Medjai, and it seems that this war must be won with brains.” Diana strode in without an invitation. “Would you be willing to help me translate?”

Evy appreciated instantly both the woman’s intelligence and confidence in asking for assistance. “What are we translating?”

Diana reached into a satchel at her side, black like her clothing, and pulled out the Book of the Dead. 

“Where did you get that?” Evy breathed, reaching for it instinctively. Diana handed it over, and Evy relished its heaviness, its seriousness. No amount of supernatural danger could change the beauty of its discovery. Scholars had mused for years over ancient Egypt -- even she had tried to recreate entire ideologies from a few wall carvings -- but this book could convey it all in language. This discovery would change Egyptology forever.

“I stole it from a scholar who was trying to protect it. I was told you are the only one who can translate it.”

“Well, now, not the only one. There are several scholars in Bembridge who have mastered the ancient text…” Evy began but then shook her head. “None of that matters right now. This book is meaningless without a key to open it.”

Diana took the book back, carefully placed her hands on each end of the binding, and wrenched. If Evy had not seen it happen, she would never have believed it. She could already imagine herself telling this tale to Jonathan and getting that skeptically raised eyebrow she usually gave him.

The book popped open.

“How did you do that?” Evy enunciated each word slowly, her mouth forming a wide O to match her eyes. She took the book from Diana’s hands before the woman could turn that blind strength on it in a more destructive way.

“I am an Amazon,” Diana spoke her words without hubris.

“An Amazon?” Evy’s natural curiosity swirled up in her insides, lit a thousand candles. “The stories of the Amazons predate the Greeks. Some scholars even believe the ancient Scythians inspired the stories. Amazons are…”

Evy caught herself before she blurted out the words “not real” because it seemed a distinctly stupid thing to say to the woman standing before her.

“... not usually portrayed as having super strength.”

“I am unusual.”

“I should say so,” Evy said. She swallowed down her thousands of questions. “I want to ask you absolutely everything about your unusuality and your culture when we have a moment, but for now, let’s translate an ancient text.”

Evy considered being frightened as they pulled pen and paper from her suitcase and sat down at the small round table with the Book of the Dead and some sort of supernaturally-powerful Amazonian. Then she remembered the mummy in the cavern, its face distorted, its rotten flesh disturbingly scentless, the violence emanating from its being. She didn’t have enough fear left to distribute any to her interactions with Diana Prince.

She worked her way along the text, following the well-preserved glyphs.

At her father’s knee, she had been taught two very different lessons. In his gentle, soft, and reverent voice, he told her his great love story, a swashbuckling tale of adventure in the soft sands of Egypt, complete with the man begging on his knees for his beloved’s hand. With his other voice, the firm, fatherly one, he had drilled her in academics until she reached him and then she had drilled herself until she surpassed not only him but all the scholars he knew.

Of the lessons he taught, only one had stuck. She had studied herself into the ground, earned a position at Cairo’s Museum of Antiquities, and she had never noticed her lack of adventure nor the absence of romance in her life. Until the Bembridge Scholars had rejected her application -- ostensibly because of lack of field experience but truly because she was a woman -- she had never even considered going out into the field. She loved being a librarian, a translator.

Now she applied those skills and chastised the Bembridge Scholars for foolishly passing her up. 

“This one could be the symbol for Ma’at. Not the goddess herself but the idea of balance. So this one…” Evy traced her finger over the nearest symbol. “It might be symbolic of the Nile as restorative of balance, part of the Ma’at. Or the Nile could just be an easily accessible symbol for water itself. It certainly would be convenient to turn the hose on the old mummy and watch him melt away into oblivion.”

“Seems unlikely,” Diana replied patiently, pen still poised over the paper waiting for something to write down.

“It certainly does.” Evy continued to prattle aloud as she translated until she had worked them to several workable theories. All of them pointed to the same terrible conclusion; whether it would be spoken words, water, or bronze weapons that ended the mummy, it would have to be done back in the tunnels of Hamunaptra. She looked down at Diana’s notes, orderly modern Egyptian descriptions of everything Evy had said. 

Suddenly the doors of the room burst open, the wood splintering as it hit the walls on either side with force. Diana leaped to her feet, drew a sword somehow from the length of her back. Evy grabbed the Book of the Dead, clutched it tightly to her chest. As she did, its lock clicked and hissed its way back into place.

The man entered with the sweeping walk of a human who had known power and authority, his body once more draped in skin. He wore ancient robes, a heavy holy relic hanging from his neck. He no longer looked like a creature but something more terrible, something indescribable.

“Anck-Su-Namun, our love will be complete once more.” He spoke in a low, soothing whisper, his dark eyes on Evy. She struggled to understand the ancient tongue in the heavy accent.

“She is not your love.” Diana stepped toward him, sword gripped with both hands in front of her. The ancient language flowed from her easily, naturally. “Imhotep, you must return to the Underworld.”

The mummy startled to a half-smile as if his surprise brought him pleasure. “You are a warrior.” 

“I am.”

They clashed with such suddenness Evy barely had time to process it. Diana’s sword flashed against the inhuman skin, slicing not through muscle and bone but stringy gray rot. Evy’s stomach turned as the arm dropped to the ground, but Imhotep did not flinch. He advanced through Diana, other arm outstretched, and Evy opened her mouth to scream as he became a swirling sand devil, sweeping her into darkness.

* * *

“Well, I see you are still a revolting little worm waiting on a nasty end squished on the bottom of someone’s shoe.”

Evy stuck her chin out as she bounced along on camelback once more, her glare pointed at Beni Gabor. He might believe himself a winner, but her faith in righteousness remained strong. He, however, ignored her statement, shooting her a grey-toothed smile and tugging on the rope tying their camels together.

She had regained consciousness in Imhotep’s arms, cradled tenderly against a chest with no beating heart, and the creature had brushed a kiss on her forehead as he placed her on a camel to begin yet another trek across the desert. His gentleness disconcerted her more than brutishness could. Now she looked ahead at his back, straight and regal in spite of the rollicking gait of a camel, and noted the Book of the Dead strapped to his saddlebag.

Heroics sounded quite appealing, especially after seeing a poised, scholarly woman produce a sword from men’s attire and wield it so elegantly, but she could not see a clear path forward. Here in the middle of the desert, she would die even if she managed to somehow steal the book. The smartest course of action, for once, was to do nothing until they reached Hamunaptra.

Nothing bored quickly though.

“Tell me about your death?” She cobbled the Egyptian together, confident she had spoken it correctly, but Imhotep did not react. 

She tried again. “I know you suffered the Hom-Dai. I read it on your sarcophagus.”

“You stupid woman,” Beni muttered. He shot a fearful glance at Imhotep.

“How am I part of you finding Anck-Su-Namun?”

But the unbendable silence remained, broken only by whispering desert sands. She slumped in the saddle and waited for either opportunity or rescue.


	3. Chapter 3

“She’s gone? It took her?” 

Steve noted hollowly what a curious thing it was to watch someone else receive devastating news. Rick O’Connell stared at Diana, and his American chivalry battled with his desire to blame her. 

“Yes. Imhotep took the Book of the Dead as well.”

Steve saw the muscle at the corner of Rick’s jaw tighten, watched his fists clench and then relax at his sides.

“So let’s go get her.”

His resigned bravery and bravado felt enough like looking a mirror that Steve turned away. As soon as they had begun their search of the city, it had fallen apart. The civilians around them began a hollow, rhythmic chanting, Imhotep’s name over and over, and turned on them. In a sea of bodies, the brainwashed could smell their targets. 

Steve would spare Diana ever needing to know how Rick had turned his weapon on the crowd, gunning down innocents just to clear them a path to the hotel. Rick had turned to the edge of the hotel’s paving stones and neatly, efficiently, vomited afterward. 

“They were cursed by the creature. They could not be stopped any other way.” Ardeth had put his hand on Rick’s shoulder, the calling card of comfort from one soldier to another. Jonathan, pale and wobbly, had asked if he could do something scholarly. They had sent him to Terrence Bey’s office at the Museum of Antiquities to seek help, a mercy mission to get Jonathan away from combat.

Then the three experienced men had turned back to their task only to see Diana moving toward them, gleaming sword drawn and face hard.

Now Rick continued simply, “I’m not riding across the desert. We’ll never catch them. Give me fifteen minutes. Get you a drink or something.” 

Rick’s footfalls carried him away from the hotel room and down the adjacent stairs. Steve turned to Diana. His fingers itched for her, and as if reading his mind, she obliged, moving into his touch. He ran his hands from her shoulders to her waist, pressing them in until the steel of her bones reminded him she was unharmed.

“Are you okay?” He touched her face now, slid his thumb across the curve of her cheekbone. “I hear this monster’s the end of the world.”

Diana took his other hand and squeezed it in hers. “I surprised him. He called me a warrior. He still knows fear.”

“He?” Steve preferred the sexless language to describe an ancient evil.

“I believe the monster is still mostly the man he was,” she replied.

“Maybe the man was mostly monster.”

“Perhaps.”

They met one another’s gaze and let long seconds spill out between them without words, love flowing out into the space with enough force to submerge his fears and doubts. Together they would save the world. They would save the girl. 

“We can never catch them on horse or camel. I believe the sands would pass our progress to him,” Diana said. Steve marveled at the matter-of-fact way she stated something so outlandish, a mummy getting secret messages from the sand. “Rick is going to find a plane.”

Steve had known it too. Even in the brief time he had spent with Rick had proven the man no fool, so Steve knew he too would know the necessity of aircraft for the trip. 

“He may need a pilot,” she continued.

“He may not.” Steve pulled her tighter into his embrace, buried his face in the soft curve of her neck. “But if he does, I can fly it.”

“You don’t even know what kind of plane he will rummage up.” Her amusement warmed his skin in a chuckled exhale.

He smiled too. “I know whatever it is, I can fly it.”

They slipped apart to partake in the Scotch from the bedside table while Diana filled him in on the preliminary translations she had gotten through with Evy. 

Together they debated the efficacy of the plans. He pointed out the unlikeliness of water as a destructive force in a culture so dependent on the Nile’s flooding for life, but she countered with the reminder that the destruction of Imhotep might be considered as life-giving as the annual flooding.

“I wish I knew why the Hom-Dai was harnessed in this way. Sacred rites and rituals come from the gods, but the implementation is usually up to the users,” Diana said.

“No matter how you cut it, it’s stupid to risk Armageddon just to make one bad guy have a rotten afterlife.”

“Unless there was another reason to use it, an evil influence that pressured them to take this step.”

His stomach dropped. “Like Ares?”

“Every culture has its gods, Steve. It’s possible.”

“You don’t think there’s only one pantheon of gods? Sure, we may all give them different names and different powers, but really, the God of War is Ares, no matter which way you slice it?”

“Don’t you think it would be hubris for me to be so certain my people are the only ones in all the world to get it right?”

“Shit.” Steve rubbed a hand over his face and took a very long sip of Scotch. “I just want to destroy this mummy and go home. Maybe take a vacation. We could go to the beach.”

“Maybe even see some sand,” she replied, and even though she didn’t smile, her eyes met his with wicked twinkling. He laughed too and muttered a small, silent bit of gratitude for a partner whose conversational skills could be both dramatic and comedic.

Rick rounded the corner back into the room with a grim half-smile. “I’ve got us a plane and an old drunk pilot.”

“Wonderful.” Steve shot back the rest of his glass of Scotch and stood up.

* * *

Less of an airport and more of a strip of asphalt outside a makeshift hangar, the whole operation looked halfway to rack and ruin before they even puttered the plane out on the runway. The Stampe SV-4 had rusty bullet holes in its body and a patched crack along its left wing. Rick O’Connell pointed at it, as if neither Ardeth or Steve would guess it was their plane without explanation.

“The pilot’s been trying to die ever since he survived the Great War,” Rick explained. “Name’s Winston.”

Steve sized the pilot up as no more sky-worthy than the plane itself. Winston slouched in the cockpit, florid face glowing under his goggles, mossy grin visible from the ground.

“Load up, Rick, my boy. This adventure is ours!” He shouted out.

“What exactly did he fly in the war?” Steve asked.

“Planes.” Rick shrugged. “C’mon.”

As they loaded onto the plane, a bag of weaponry tossed into the floor and two men in space barely meant for one, Steve indulged himself in wishing he had gone with Diana. She moved faster alone, and he knew no plane, train, or car could move faster to the sounds of distress than she would... but letting this pilot fly this deathtrap anywhere smelled too much like a suicide mission. 

He watched Ardeth settle himself on the wing, Rick trussing him with rope.

“You flew in the war?” Steve called up to Winston.

“Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force,” Winston confirmed in a cheery slur. “At your service.”

“Discharged?” Steve asked.

“No, sir.” Winston sputtered his outrage. “Active service. The last of my regiment here in Cairo.”

Britain had pulled all able pilots out of Cairo years ago. The only reason a pilot would be left behind was incompetence. Steve glanced at the spray of gray, just visible under the leather flying cap, and suspected Winston had been left here rather than brought home and discharged due to age. Someone in an office, staring at rubber stamps, had probably not had the heart to tell an old war hero he needed a new life.

“Are you drunk?” Steve asked. At his age, Winston’s eyesight was probably questionable on his best days. 

“Sonny, I have been drunk since 1918. I lost everything but my life in the service.”

Steve stood up just as Rick clambered back into the plane. “I’ll fly it.”

“What?” Doubt and irritation wrinkled Rick’s features.

“I was a pilot in the war.” Rick looked unconvinced.

Steve abandoned modesty. “One of the best pilots.”

Rick glanced at Winston, checking gauges and humming to himself.

Steve added, “And I’m sober.”

Within ten minutes, they had swapped pilots, given Winston enough money for every prostitute left in Cairo, put Ardeth in an actual seat, and gotten ready to fly once more. Steve ignored the pounding, angry roil of his stomach acid. He had not flown a plane since the accident. Only Diana knew why. 

Amongst peers, he played it off as quirk, an elite pilot taking a break now that peace reigned, but she had been there in the long nights when he awoke to the pain of cold, salty sweat dripping into his third-degree burns. She knew his fear.

_ He may need a pilot_. She had known then, as had he, he supposed, that he would need to fly again today. The only way Steve Trevor knew how to save the world was in a cockpit.

His fear melted away in the mechanics. Shift, throttle, adjust… he guided them up and over. He could hear a cheer and realized neither of the men behind him had ever flown. He tried to remember that exhilaration of his first time, but in the sea for firsts, he instead plunged into the memory of his first dogfight, the twisting, turning aerial combat and the hot, lusty rush of victory.

Confidence returned. He whooped.

“Hold on, boys. We’re on a tight schedule.” 

He charted his course based on the map stuffed here in the cockpit, a faded old paper with ink splotches accompanying Rick’s hasty scrawl. He used his watch, a timepiece nearly as battered as this plane, to track their time. In blue skies over still sand, a living supernatural creature seemed an impossibility. 

Steve just flew until he saw that the dusty ruins ahead matched the approximate coordinates on the map.

“Hamunaptra, here we come,” he muttered and began their descent.

“Hey Steve…” Rick’s voice broke loose. “Pedal faster!”

Steve looked back to see a wall of sand, advancing on them from behind, thirty feet above the plane. Its shadow swallowed his line of sight.

“Shit.”

“Go! Go!” Rick shouted unhelpfully, completely unaware of anything about flying a plane. Steve stared at the city ahead, half-sunken in the same substance threatening to destroy them, and pushed the plane harder, asked a little more of it.

The wall of sand created a face, its mouth gaping to swallow them.

“C’mon, baby. Give me a little something,” he muttered to her as he cranked the throttle straight forward and pedaled the rudder to the right. Underneath him, the plane roared, sped up, sputtered, and then gave out. Its living, humming vibration, the promise of operation, ceased.

They began to freefall from the sky.

The face’s open mouth became a smug line as the sand wall dropped to the earth, unnecessary in the face of their all-too-human predicament. 

_ I’m going to die in a plane crash, after all,_ Steve thought unironically. His companions screamed.

They were going to die. It would be instant, so sudden as to be painless, but it was inevitable.

Then something collided with the plummeting plane. The impact threw Steve like a ragdoll, slamming his head into the controls, the pain intense enough to momentarily blind him. A glittering, dazzling array of light exploded behind his eyelids. 

When he opened his eyes again, he saw Diana, clad in the red, gold, and blue of Wonder Woman, shoulder first against the nose of the plane. She grunted, braced against the metal, and in her capable hands, the plane slowed until it skidded to a haphazard stop along the sand, a safe emergency landing.

“Lucky timing,” Steve muttered. Diana flashed him a grin.


End file.
